"...why should the label keep hiring the band to make more cds so they lose more money?"
Isn't this the way it works everywhere?
If the poster you're replying to no longer generates revenue for his employer, or aids in the generation of revenue by writing code, or other copyrighted material, would they continue to employ him?
The RIAA and / or MPAA aren't in the business of facilitating artists' need to create, they are there to make money, as is any other business, and the artists that no longer generate revenue are dropped like hot rocks regularly.
Not that I think that was a point you were trying to make, just a conclusion that can obviously be drawn from what you did have to say.
As for protecting the rights of copyright holders with this "new" medium of content delivery...
Isn't it sort of pointless? Provided any copyrighted material can be rendered into a form that is easily distributable electronically, it will be disseminated. Right, wrong, or indifferent, mp3's will be traded, movies will be "pirated," and pdf versions of your favorite novels will all be swapped, the only questions is how visible this will be to the general public and what risks those doing so will run.
As an example of what I'm getting at, look for some of the more "private" or exclussive file swapping networks.
From there, it's easy to draw the conclusion that all copyright holders are, at the most basic level, going to be relying on the goodwill of their fellow "netizens" to reimburse them, or to generate revenue from their ideas, art, or other copyrighted works.
As long as things are distributable via an electronic format, any technological means of protection, are going to be fairly readily circumvented. It's a given. The nuances of that can be argued to death, but I believe it to be an essential truth of the situation.
We're then left with the social arena to help insure copyright. Produce works profound enough that the audience is left willing to pay, educate the masses that copyright violation is a "bad thing," and that those who do so are morally unsound. Sure, human nature being what it is, that's sort of like whistling in the dark. It's just not going to happen on a wide scale.
So, like anything else that can be easily made off with there must be a level of deterence involved. Come up with something that simply makes it more hassle than it's worth for the general public, and we're doing that now. Encryption of files, a certain level of hassle free DRM can be equated to a car alarm, or those anti-shoplifting tags in books and on CD's.
They're not going to prevent someone who really wants to steal your stuff, but they deter the average schmoe.
I guess I fail to see what all the furor's over then. Sure, the RIAA and MPAA are being butt heads about the process, but beyond that, what's the big deal?
I still classify myself as a gamer. I own an Xbox, I have a PC dedicated to gaming. I carry a GBA with me everywhere. (I carry a book too, but I digress).
Yet as each week goes on, I pull the GBA or the book out of the laptop bag less often. When I get home, I first sit down in front of the PC to help a friend out with a server somewhere, and if I have time afterwards then I'll play a game, maybe. The Xbox gets more use as a a DVD player than as a game system.
Don't get me wrong, they all get used often enough to justify their existence and expense, but as I've "grown up" the demands on my time, work, friends, car and home maintenance, obligations to other people, divergent other interests, they all take up time, and seemingly disproportionate amounts of time at that.
A friend has a problem with the mail server he's running for his website, and suddenly two or three hours of a Saturday have disappeared. Problem with the servers at work, or a highly placed user who can't seem to grasp that maintenace schedules mean the server won't be available that weekend and another hour disappears by the time you're done with that set of phone calls. Girlfriend is feeling needy or has had a bad day and wants to vent? Give up on getting anything else done for an incalculable amount of time.
A good game is as much a time commitment as any of the above, and I find my gaming is much more oriented toward things I can pick up and put down readily these days.
In essence, my point to the parent post / article is, don't worry, life will fill up with a lot more than you expect, and, eventualy, as Robmonster's indicated, they'll get back to being something that you do as you can, and enjoy when you do. Done to excess anything becomes dull after time, but life is self correcting in that regard.
religion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-ljn)
n.
1. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
2. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.
3. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
4. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
5. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Religion and Religious don't necessarily have to mean anything metaphysical as can be seen by definition 5. Merely a set of beliefs pursued with zeal and devotion. I believe the original poster was using your ardent beliefs regarding tablet PC's as his standard for religion, not your mention of a deity.
Debit / Credit cards are all well and good until some unscrupulous individual obtains your information in some fashion.
With credit cards there's a great deal you can do to combat the fraudulent charges, though it's neither a quick, nor enjoyable experience. With debit cards it's your own money that's disappeared until it all gets cleared up, if it gets cleared up.
Speaking from experience, someone using your card's info to make charges with can either be blissfully simple to correct or a minor nightmare of bureacracy depending upon the companies in question. Either way, data as currency doesn't prevent criminal or fraudulent activity, and I imagine it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility to counterfeit that as well.
Thirty-seven degrees out, it's been raining for three days, it's going to for at least a week more. You know you'll be outside in the woods and the mud for all of it, with nothing but a poncho and what you're wearing to stay warm with. The twenty plus mile road march back to the bay is looming in your mind like a reprieve from ths cold damp hell.
Your job today is to dig a foxhole or guard your buddy digging the foxhole, you trade off occasionally. Your options are either being waist deep in very cold mud, trying to shovel it into nylon bags, or shivering in the bush to defend the guy in the mud. Later tonight you're going to have to "fight off" the guys in bravo company who are serving as your "opfor" for this particular training exercise.
You can't remember what it feels like to be warm, or dry. Hypothermia, and later on tonight, frostbite, are very real threats.
Could be worse though, no one's really shooting at you, and the electronics that have been dying ad becoming more dead weight to hump back could be really important.
Yeah, I think I've had worse days in conditions that might, charitably, be described as worse. I can think of several folks I know currently undergoing worse than the above.
Body warmers, jet engines, and hearing protection? I won't question that it sucks. I won't question that it's irritating, but you shouldn't have to look hard at all for people with worse working conditions.
Sorry, insufficient proof. I view Angel (and Buffy previously) as the means by which my girlfriend takes vengeance for my slightly objectionable habits.
I swear the insipid nature of the characters grates on my soul, and the crossovers just magnified the offenses.
So, I submit, Angel would have to posses good writing in the first place in order to serve as adequate proof of cross overs adding to good writing.
I think a more appropriate question, or perhaps a more thorough one, would be;
How do you expect someone living in any moderately sized contemporary American city to make rent on the wages paid an Indian call center employee without a return to the extreme slum like conditions that were prevelanet during the industrial revolution?
The point being that, should the minimum wage law be repealed then call center employees state side, in theory, would have their wages reduced to that of Indian call center employees.
Taking $300.00 a month as an example (cribbed from the rate a coder in Shanghai works for as posted above) and theorizing a double income family, $600.00 a month, or $7200.00 a year before taxes isn't going to get you very far in any contemporary American landscape.
Now, it can be argued, that should the same wage decrease be economy wide, the cost of goods, housing, etc. would go down as well. It fails to take into account the reaction of those that the wage decrease would impact. Sure, some would get another sort of job, or attempt to find education, but what of those that couldn't afford those options and were now forced to accept it in order to "support" their families?
Here in the U.S. I'd imagine we'd see some fairly impressive, if viewed from a distance, civil disorder.
Buddhists, Shintoists, Jews, Muslims, Zoastrians, Agnostics, Atheists, modern Druids, Wiccans, et al. never actually marry and / or produce offspring.
Well, seeing as how you're advocating blind religous zealotry you probably do view their silly compacts of fidelity as something other than marriage.
This is off topic derailment of the thread is all about American concepts of marriage, and the last I checked their was a rule specifying something about a seperation of church and state to prevent just such illogical ideas from polluting the lives of its citizenry.
Like it or not, whether your narrow religously bound blindness allows for it or not, marriage as an institution, as a contract with legal ramifications, privileges and responsibilities exists outside of, and irrespective of, religion.
Therefore, any argument against any form of marriage based solely on religious beliefs can, and probably should, be immediately ruled out as a viable one.
It depends, are the children starving, or the humans not allowed to procreate within the borders of the same country that they're talking about giving rights to the artificial intelligence in?
Women, who are citizens of the United States have a great many rights that they aren't allowed to exercise when they travel to certain foreign countries. They will be arrested for not wearing veils in certain states.
Should a full blown, actual factual AI appear tomorrow in the U.S. would you advocate denying it the rights of any other intelligent national of the U.S. because there are children starving in Africa, or Chinese citizens have their procreation limited by their government, or women are second class citizens in any number of other countries?
While the U.S. may be able to influence these other countries, and I like the idea of a Utopian world as much as the next man, holding that all humans should be in full posession and practicing their "inalienable rights" before we extend those self same rights to non human intelligences, should the opportunity present itself, strikes me as mildy impractical, to say the least.
"Then that person doesn't have the right to listen to the music."
Really? Then when that music comes on the radio, or their friend happens to be playing the CD in their company, or they, zombie Jesus forbid, tape it off the radio (long a legally protected right), what then?
How are they to determine whether the CD is worth buying or not if they've "no right" to listen to the music prior to buiyng a CD?
There's the sticky questions of enforcement and punishment too. Shall everyone be forced to equip themselves with earplugs? Shall we fill up the ear canals of those who inadvertently overhear someone listening to the music that other person has purchased a CD of and thereby obtained the right to listen to?
Sorry to go on at length, but I figured a silly comment deserved a silly response.
It doesn't sound as convincing because it's a pretty ridiculous analaogy.
He writes code for a month and wants exclussive access to the software that is the product of his code. That's probably semi-reasonable.
Just as you desiring exclussive access to the gravel that is the end result of you breaking rocks is also probably semi reasonable, or me desiring exclussive access to the pile of firewood I've created outside my cabin from my month's work at splitting lengths of timber...
Now if he'd been talking about the exclussive right to write code...
I'm 33, still singleish, and between working and dating I've found my time for gaming has gone way down. I think that's a given at this age, but I find, unlike you, I opt for the longer rpg type games.
I get a great deal of time out of one game, spreading it out into a couple hour at a time chunks over several weeks, and it winds up saving me a ton of cash compared to back when I went through a couple of games a week. Then again, these are always the sorts of games I've enjoyed./shrug.
GameSpy welcomes any and all help finding genuine bugs and security breaches on our servers. What we don't welcome are people publishing security hacks that have the potential to hurt our products. GameSpy products are supposed to be about having fun, but hacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks take the fun out of it. It doesn't simply hurt GameSpy; it hurts every person playing games with our products.
What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D -- he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.
But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question.
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers.
Let me repeat: We welcome any bug alerts and will fix any and all security breaches that come to our attention. We find and fix nearly all of them before any external sources find them. It's all about playing games and having fun, people! That's why we do what we do! However, we won't pay "consulting fees" to people who create CDkey hacks of our proprietary software, then post the results if we don't pay them.
Gamers trust us. We have to protect them from any and all attacks on our network that affect gamers.
I welcome contacting me about this issue! Please send an email directly to me at marks@gamespy.com.
Did their legal department just fire off the C&D without consulting with anyone or did the upper levels of Gamespy's management ask for it to be sent out?
Did the lawyers go off on their own or does Gamespy have a substantially different view of their corespondence with Luigi than the one we've got from Luigi's own website?
There's no question that they look like fools though. The mere act of using the DMCA to threaten a citizen of another country invites any number of comparisons, none of them flattering.
Just wanted to commend you, and the rest of the folks at XCOR for the work you're doing in making as much information available to the rest of the world as you have, and to thank you for hanging out here disseminating information.
It's refreshing to see someone take the time to correct and clarify the opinionating and theorizing that's normal for the Slashdot community's commentary on articles. My own as well as other's.
Of course it doesn't sound fair, but what's fair got to do with reality?
I'm not arguing that his being fired was justified, in my opinion it wasn't, and I certainly agree with you on it being retroactive and stupid, but, as the parent post to which I replied asked, what they were going to do, ban cell phones with cameras?
The answer sure, why not, it's been done elsewhere, seems an elegant sufficiency.
As for GM's layouts being available elsewhere and the ease of circumventing poorly thought out restrictions, I'm fairly certain any number of line workers can think, and to my certain knowledge, have thought, of ways to circumvent them without straining themselves, to say nothing of the creativeness you or any other Slashdotter is capable of.
None of which has any bearing on the existence of arbitrary and poorly thought out corporate dictums that will still get you fired, despite being arbitrary and poorly thought out, which is what I was discussing.
GM, after some photos of prototype and test build vehicles leaked out earlier this year has done precisely that, banned all cameras, digital cameras, and cell phones with digital camera attachments, not possesed by authorized personnel, from all production and development facilities.
When the tornado hit the plant in OKC back at the beginning of May, the only photos allowed at close range, where details of the damage could be made out accurately, were strictly controlled, and the official reasoning was to prevent "the competition" from getting any insight into how long it would be out of production, exactly how the facility was set up, etc.
Contractors and temp workers hired during that period in particular were told that should they take pictures they'd be escorted off the job site and would not be returning.
It may be of less concern than some things, but consider, it's an official company communication, which may, or may not, become widely disseminated throughout the corporation, and elsewhere as it has in this case.
It's hardly the place for humour, sarcastic or otherwise, if for no other reason than it's likely to get a reaction similar to what we see here.
Humanity being humanity sooner or later it's bound to come into the hands of someone who doesn't get that it's sarcasm, has no sense of humour in the first place, or is just so uptight that seeing one of their employees engage in a little harmless levity, convinces them that it's only the tip of the iceberg as far as that employee wasting the company's time and / or resources.
The point, of course, being that including it will only serve to the employee's, and potentially the company's detriment, again, as it has here.
That's if it's sarcasm in the first place, and despite the legion of slashdotters believing it to be, it's still only conjecture. It could, just as easily be a legitimate belief of that person.
Assuming it is sarcasm is just as flawed an assumption as assuming it is.
I'm sure we're all familiar with assume = ass + u + me?
Sig or not, legitimate or not, it's wholly inappropriate for it to appear on any form of official communication, and Diebold, and that employee are reaping their rewards, justified or unjustified.
Yeah, it's that "in practice" bit that's the real drag as District Attorneys seem to campaign on their number of successful convictions, high profile convictions, etc.
Prosecutors et al, learn all to rapidly that it's in their best interests to go for a conviction and prosecute the best potential candidate when there isn't a preponderance of evidence and there are multiple suspects.
What would the voters think if someone wasn't punished after all?
I'm sorry, I really don't mean to be offensive, but it's posts such as this that make me wish for a naive category for moderation.
If there's one thing we've learned just from watching the software patent nonsense here in the States, it's that if you don't patent the concept your software embodies, someone else will write something similar enough to be practically identical and patent that.
Just how many patents have we seen approved in the last year that prior art would seemingly bar from approval, but doesn't?
Slashdot Mirror
"...why should the label keep hiring the band to make more cds so they lose more money?"
Isn't this the way it works everywhere?
If the poster you're replying to no longer generates revenue for his employer, or aids in the generation of revenue by writing code, or other copyrighted material, would they continue to employ him?
The RIAA and / or MPAA aren't in the business of facilitating artists' need to create, they are there to make money, as is any other business, and the artists that no longer generate revenue are dropped like hot rocks regularly.
Not that I think that was a point you were trying to make, just a conclusion that can obviously be drawn from what you did have to say.
As for protecting the rights of copyright holders with this "new" medium of content delivery...
Isn't it sort of pointless? Provided any copyrighted material can be rendered into a form that is easily distributable electronically, it will be disseminated. Right, wrong, or indifferent, mp3's will be traded, movies will be "pirated," and pdf versions of your favorite novels will all be swapped, the only questions is how visible this will be to the general public and what risks those doing so will run.
As an example of what I'm getting at, look for some of the more "private" or exclussive file swapping networks.
From there, it's easy to draw the conclusion that all copyright holders are, at the most basic level, going to be relying on the goodwill of their fellow "netizens" to reimburse them, or to generate revenue from their ideas, art, or other copyrighted works.
As long as things are distributable via an electronic format, any technological means of protection, are going to be fairly readily circumvented. It's a given. The nuances of that can be argued to death, but I believe it to be an essential truth of the situation.
We're then left with the social arena to help insure copyright. Produce works profound enough that the audience is left willing to pay, educate the masses that copyright violation is a "bad thing," and that those who do so are morally unsound. Sure, human nature being what it is, that's sort of like whistling in the dark. It's just not going to happen on a wide scale.
So, like anything else that can be easily made off with there must be a level of deterence involved. Come up with something that simply makes it more hassle than it's worth for the general public, and we're doing that now. Encryption of files, a certain level of hassle free DRM can be equated to a car alarm, or those anti-shoplifting tags in books and on CD's.
They're not going to prevent someone who really wants to steal your stuff, but they deter the average schmoe.
I guess I fail to see what all the furor's over then. Sure, the RIAA and MPAA are being butt heads about the process, but beyond that, what's the big deal?
-H
Hey, if it gives the space program a much needed shot in the arm, why not?
WMD's on Mars! Get 'em!
-H
I couldn't agree more.
I still classify myself as a gamer. I own an Xbox, I have a PC dedicated to gaming. I carry a GBA with me everywhere. (I carry a book too, but I digress).
Yet as each week goes on, I pull the GBA or the book out of the laptop bag less often. When I get home, I first sit down in front of the PC to help a friend out with a server somewhere, and if I have time afterwards then I'll play a game, maybe. The Xbox gets more use as a a DVD player than as a game system.
Don't get me wrong, they all get used often enough to justify their existence and expense, but as I've "grown up" the demands on my time, work, friends, car and home maintenance, obligations to other people, divergent other interests, they all take up time, and seemingly disproportionate amounts of time at that.
A friend has a problem with the mail server he's running for his website, and suddenly two or three hours of a Saturday have disappeared. Problem with the servers at work, or a highly placed user who can't seem to grasp that maintenace schedules mean the server won't be available that weekend and another hour disappears by the time you're done with that set of phone calls. Girlfriend is feeling needy or has had a bad day and wants to vent? Give up on getting anything else done for an incalculable amount of time.
A good game is as much a time commitment as any of the above, and I find my gaming is much more oriented toward things I can pick up and put down readily these days.
In essence, my point to the parent post / article is, don't worry, life will fill up with a lot more than you expect, and, eventualy, as Robmonster's indicated, they'll get back to being something that you do as you can, and enjoy when you do. Done to excess anything becomes dull after time, but life is self correcting in that regard.
-H
Religion and Religious don't necessarily have to mean anything metaphysical as can be seen by definition 5. Merely a set of beliefs pursued with zeal and devotion. I believe the original poster was using your ardent beliefs regarding tablet PC's as his standard for religion, not your mention of a deity.
Definitions from Webster's.
-H
Debit / Credit cards are all well and good until some unscrupulous individual obtains your information in some fashion.
With credit cards there's a great deal you can do to combat the fraudulent charges, though it's neither a quick, nor enjoyable experience. With debit cards it's your own money that's disappeared until it all gets cleared up, if it gets cleared up.
Speaking from experience, someone using your card's info to make charges with can either be blissfully simple to correct or a minor nightmare of bureacracy depending upon the companies in question. Either way, data as currency doesn't prevent criminal or fraudulent activity, and I imagine it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility to counterfeit that as well.
Thirty-seven degrees out, it's been raining for three days, it's going to for at least a week more. You know you'll be outside in the woods and the mud for all of it, with nothing but a poncho and what you're wearing to stay warm with. The twenty plus mile road march back to the bay is looming in your mind like a reprieve from ths cold damp hell.
Your job today is to dig a foxhole or guard your buddy digging the foxhole, you trade off occasionally. Your options are either being waist deep in very cold mud, trying to shovel it into nylon bags, or shivering in the bush to defend the guy in the mud. Later tonight you're going to have to "fight off" the guys in bravo company who are serving as your "opfor" for this particular training exercise.
You can't remember what it feels like to be warm, or dry. Hypothermia, and later on tonight, frostbite, are very real threats.
Could be worse though, no one's really shooting at you, and the electronics that have been dying ad becoming more dead weight to hump back could be really important.
Yeah, I think I've had worse days in conditions that might, charitably, be described as worse. I can think of several folks I know currently undergoing worse than the above.
Body warmers, jet engines, and hearing protection? I won't question that it sucks. I won't question that it's irritating, but you shouldn't have to look hard at all for people with worse working conditions.
-H
Sorry, insufficient proof. I view Angel (and Buffy previously) as the means by which my girlfriend takes vengeance for my slightly objectionable habits.
I swear the insipid nature of the characters grates on my soul, and the crossovers just magnified the offenses.
So, I submit, Angel would have to posses good writing in the first place in order to serve as adequate proof of cross overs adding to good writing.
Then again, "good" is a pretty subjective thing.
-H
I think a more appropriate question, or perhaps a more thorough one, would be;
How do you expect someone living in any moderately sized contemporary American city to make rent on the wages paid an Indian call center employee without a return to the extreme slum like conditions that were prevelanet during the industrial revolution?
The point being that, should the minimum wage law be repealed then call center employees state side, in theory, would have their wages reduced to that of Indian call center employees.
Taking $300.00 a month as an example (cribbed from the rate a coder in Shanghai works for as posted above) and theorizing a double income family, $600.00 a month, or $7200.00 a year before taxes isn't going to get you very far in any contemporary American landscape.
Now, it can be argued, that should the same wage decrease be economy wide, the cost of goods, housing, etc. would go down as well. It fails to take into account the reaction of those that the wage decrease would impact. Sure, some would get another sort of job, or attempt to find education, but what of those that couldn't afford those options and were now forced to accept it in order to "support" their families?
Here in the U.S. I'd imagine we'd see some fairly impressive, if viewed from a distance, civil disorder.
-H
Because we all know only Christians get married.
Buddhists, Shintoists, Jews, Muslims, Zoastrians, Agnostics, Atheists, modern Druids, Wiccans, et al. never actually marry and / or produce offspring.
Well, seeing as how you're advocating blind religous zealotry you probably do view their silly compacts of fidelity as something other than marriage.
This is off topic derailment of the thread is all about American concepts of marriage, and the last I checked their was a rule specifying something about a seperation of church and state to prevent just such illogical ideas from polluting the lives of its citizenry.
Like it or not, whether your narrow religously bound blindness allows for it or not, marriage as an institution, as a contract with legal ramifications, privileges and responsibilities exists outside of, and irrespective of, religion.
Therefore, any argument against any form of marriage based solely on religious beliefs can, and probably should, be immediately ruled out as a viable one.
Care to try again? Twit?
-H
It depends, are the children starving, or the humans not allowed to procreate within the borders of the same country that they're talking about giving rights to the artificial intelligence in?
Women, who are citizens of the United States have a great many rights that they aren't allowed to exercise when they travel to certain foreign countries. They will be arrested for not wearing veils in certain states.
Should a full blown, actual factual AI appear tomorrow in the U.S. would you advocate denying it the rights of any other intelligent national of the U.S. because there are children starving in Africa, or Chinese citizens have their procreation limited by their government, or women are second class citizens in any number of other countries?
While the U.S. may be able to influence these other countries, and I like the idea of a Utopian world as much as the next man, holding that all humans should be in full posession and practicing their "inalienable rights" before we extend those self same rights to non human intelligences, should the opportunity present itself, strikes me as mildy impractical, to say the least.
-H
/sigh
;)
That's it, correct yourself after I decide to wax eloquent.
-H
How are they to determine whether the CD is worth buying or not if they've "no right" to listen to the music prior to buiyng a CD?
There's the sticky questions of enforcement and punishment too. Shall everyone be forced to equip themselves with earplugs? Shall we fill up the ear canals of those who inadvertently overhear someone listening to the music that other person has purchased a CD of and thereby obtained the right to listen to?
Sorry to go on at length, but I figured a silly comment deserved a silly response.
-H
It doesn't sound as convincing because it's a pretty ridiculous analaogy.
He writes code for a month and wants exclussive access to the software that is the product of his code. That's probably semi-reasonable.
Just as you desiring exclussive access to the gravel that is the end result of you breaking rocks is also probably semi reasonable, or me desiring exclussive access to the pile of firewood I've created outside my cabin from my month's work at splitting lengths of timber...
Now if he'd been talking about the exclussive right to write code...
-H
Well, in all fairness, they did manage to misplace their wives...
-H
I'm 33, still singleish, and between working and dating I've found my time for gaming has gone way down. I think that's a given at this age, but I find, unlike you, I opt for the longer rpg type games.
/shrug.
I get a great deal of time out of one game, spreading it out into a couple hour at a time chunks over several weeks, and it winds up saving me a ton of cash compared to back when I went through a couple of games a week. Then again, these are always the sorts of games I've enjoyed.
-H
http://www.gamespydaily.com/news/fullstory.asp?id
It reads;
-H
if Gamespy responds to this, and if so, how.
Did their legal department just fire off the C&D without consulting with anyone or did the upper levels of Gamespy's management ask for it to be sent out?
Did the lawyers go off on their own or does Gamespy have a substantially different view of their corespondence with Luigi than the one we've got from Luigi's own website?
There's no question that they look like fools though. The mere act of using the DMCA to threaten a citizen of another country invites any number of comparisons, none of them flattering.
-H
Just wanted to commend you, and the rest of the folks at XCOR for the work you're doing in making as much information available to the rest of the world as you have, and to thank you for hanging out here disseminating information.
It's refreshing to see someone take the time to correct and clarify the opinionating and theorizing that's normal for the Slashdot community's commentary on articles. My own as well as other's.
-H
Of course it doesn't sound fair, but what's fair got to do with reality?
I'm not arguing that his being fired was justified, in my opinion it wasn't, and I certainly agree with you on it being retroactive and stupid, but, as the parent post to which I replied asked, what they were going to do, ban cell phones with cameras?
The answer sure, why not, it's been done elsewhere, seems an elegant sufficiency.
As for GM's layouts being available elsewhere and the ease of circumventing poorly thought out restrictions, I'm fairly certain any number of line workers can think, and to my certain knowledge, have thought, of ways to circumvent them without straining themselves, to say nothing of the creativeness you or any other Slashdotter is capable of.
None of which has any bearing on the existence of arbitrary and poorly thought out corporate dictums that will still get you fired, despite being arbitrary and poorly thought out, which is what I was discussing.
-H
GM, after some photos of prototype and test build vehicles leaked out earlier this year has done precisely that, banned all cameras, digital cameras, and cell phones with digital camera attachments, not possesed by authorized personnel, from all production and development facilities.
When the tornado hit the plant in OKC back at the beginning of May, the only photos allowed at close range, where details of the damage could be made out accurately, were strictly controlled, and the official reasoning was to prevent "the competition" from getting any insight into how long it would be out of production, exactly how the facility was set up, etc.
Contractors and temp workers hired during that period in particular were told that should they take pictures they'd be escorted off the job site and would not be returning.
-H
"Assuming it is sarcasm is just as flawed an assumption as assuming it is."
should have read;
Assuming it is sarcasm is just as flawed an assumption as assuming it isn't.
Someday I will learn to use the preview button.
It may be of less concern than some things, but consider, it's an official company communication, which may, or may not, become widely disseminated throughout the corporation, and elsewhere as it has in this case.
It's hardly the place for humour, sarcastic or otherwise, if for no other reason than it's likely to get a reaction similar to what we see here.
Humanity being humanity sooner or later it's bound to come into the hands of someone who doesn't get that it's sarcasm, has no sense of humour in the first place, or is just so uptight that seeing one of their employees engage in a little harmless levity, convinces them that it's only the tip of the iceberg as far as that employee wasting the company's time and / or resources.
The point, of course, being that including it will only serve to the employee's, and potentially the company's detriment, again, as it has here.
That's if it's sarcasm in the first place, and despite the legion of slashdotters believing it to be, it's still only conjecture. It could, just as easily be a legitimate belief of that person.
Assuming it is sarcasm is just as flawed an assumption as assuming it is.
I'm sure we're all familiar with assume = ass + u + me?
Sig or not, legitimate or not, it's wholly inappropriate for it to appear on any form of official communication, and Diebold, and that employee are reaping their rewards, justified or unjustified.
-H
Yeah, it's that "in practice" bit that's the real drag as District Attorneys seem to campaign on their number of successful convictions, high profile convictions, etc.
Prosecutors et al, learn all to rapidly that it's in their best interests to go for a conviction and prosecute the best potential candidate when there isn't a preponderance of evidence and there are multiple suspects.
What would the voters think if someone wasn't punished after all?
Just my opinion,
-H
I'm sorry, I really don't mean to be offensive, but it's posts such as this that make me wish for a naive category for moderation.
If there's one thing we've learned just from watching the software patent nonsense here in the States, it's that if you don't patent the concept your software embodies, someone else will write something similar enough to be practically identical and patent that.
Just how many patents have we seen approved in the last year that prior art would seemingly bar from approval, but doesn't?
-H
For those of us that restore Mustangs for fun it's always been;
;)
First On Race Day.
-H